... In Which E.J. Acknowledges Her Sense of Inadequacy in Responding to Gourevitch & Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, And Yet Does So Anyway

Given the enormity of what we're discussing, and given the fact that unlike others here I am not steeped in questions about war, torture, policing, and related issues, apparently the only way I can write another book club post is to begin by mocking my inadequacies. I signed up to discuss this book for two reasons: first, my sense of overwhelming shame and responsibility, as an American citizen, for the degeneration of my country into one that stands for torture, indefinite detention, "black sites," "extraordinary rendition," and so on. And two, my sense of profound awe at how Morris and Gourevitch's work have moved me to grief about the way those policies have destroyed not just Iraqis but also American young people.

But responding to those large realities--the realities of our national policies, and the realities of what happened to those young reservists who are at the center of S.O.P. the book and S.O.P. the movie--is actually different from responding to the movie and the book as independent objects. The first is a large moral and sociopolitical enterprise; the second is the smaller enterprise of literary criticism. Earlier this week I could only respond to the information and insights that the auteur/authors have given us. Today I want to comment a little about the artistic endeavors.

Morris's movie quite clearly has a moral and aesthetic theme: pictures lie, they lie dangerously, and they lie in a way that leaves the viewer socially culpable for her/his misinterpretation. The photos, his movie argues, are misleading and partial bits of testimony that were 'spun' in ways that ended up jailing the wrong people for the wrong things. He argues that the Administration, by manipulating the lazier parts of the corporate news/entertainment complex (to coin an utterly clunky phrase that I am too harried to fix), managed to jail powerless poor people for gathering evidence of real war crimes, and to do it in ways that made U.S. citizens feel exculpated. In doing so they led the country to believe (as the country was all too willing to believe) that nothing broadly evil was going on, and that a few stupid backwoods sadists (stupid enough to document their sadism) were rightly caught and punished.

Philip has made clear in his writing here this week, too, that he believes it's a social travesty that Lynndie England was jailed for three years for smiling and posing and falling for the wrong man, that Sabrina Harman was convicted for documenting evil and not knowing the right way to expose it--and that the real war criminals walked. The beginning of his opening post about King Leopold is a post-Sontag argument about how Kodak is actually a liar whose lies are all the more persuasive because we forget that what we see is shaped by what we think.

The two of you have persuaded me of all this. It's a powerful and moving argument. I am in awe of the achievement. Really.

But--and you knew there was a 'but' coming, right?--but I wonder, Philip, why you have not related this more directly in the book itself. This argument is tightly connected to the argument that you made so stunningly, with such sophistication and nuance, in "We wish to inform you...": that power means being able to impose your storyline, your version of reality, on others. I can see why you would have signed up to write Morris's movie: he's exploring a similar idea, albeit with the idea that the interpretation of visual evidence can be part of that imposed storyline. But it seems to me that, in the book, you did not go as far as you could have. Morris argues by indirection, by suggestion, by slow accretion of evidence. His arguments lie in the unspoken; he implies things in how he structures his material. I think that, in S.O.P. the book, you tried to rely on this structuring, this accretion of fact, in ways that are less successful. The movie has all the power of visuals and sound , of voices and faces, to keep us engaged. Your book cannot rely on those. What I was stunned by in your Rwanda book was your ability to seduce us in slowly with intellect, with curiosity and assertion and meaning and story, before putting us face to face with the harder facts, with the schoolhouse full of dead bodies or latrine full of skulls. (I read it a few years ago, and I don't have the book handy, so surely my memory is distorting those scenes.) What you've written here at TPMCafe, this week, strikes me as full of the arguments that the book wanted to make. But here they are clearer and, to me, more powerful. The book tried to rely on the documentary evidence itself to speak. But the point you and Morris are making is that documentary evidence does not speak: it is always being shaped and presented by an intelligence. I wish that your book had articulated that shaping intelligence's arguments, conclusions, and insights just a bit more.

And I do mean: just a bit. The book is a spectacular achievement. I am devastated by its accretion of facts. I wonder if that would be quite the same had I not seen the movie first.

Let me add this, too: I think you are either too cynical or too modest in your ambitions. Being an honest witness can cause change, moral reckoning, and policy alterations. There's a reason that, many years ago, I left behind being a poet and moved into journalism: I wanted to have an effect, and not just on others' emotions but on their thinking. Ideas do have consequences. Introducing a different point of view into the world of the observing and policymaking classes can cause course corrections, however slight. If I didn't believe this, I don't think I could get up in the morning. That's the reason to offer clear witness to evil and to gather and supply facts that correct dangerous misapprehensions: a different way of thinking can cause a different way of behaving.

Of course we are always tugged back into laziness. Of course there are always forces pulling us towards barbarism and violence. But how much worse would those tendencies be if not exposed and articulated?

By some accident, I haven't had a full night's sleep in a week, so I am not entirely sure that I've been coherent here. And so I'll end on an entirely unrelated note: have you ever read my favorite book in the world, Heda Kovaly's Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968? If you have, I would be dying to know what you thought of it.

Come back and visit us here sometime.

EJ